Commercial Real Estate Pro Network

Commercial Real Estate Professionals who work with Investors, Buyers and Sellers of Commercial Real Estate. We discuss todays opportunities, problems & solutions in Commercial Real Estate.

Return to Office Trends on Hospitality with Sundip Patel - CRE PN #507 06/12/2025

BIGGEST RISK with Sundip Patel 06/10/2025

AI in Real Estate with David Blumenfeld - CRE PN #506 06/05/2025

BIGGEST RISK with David Blumenfeld 06/03/2025

BIGGEST RISK with David Blumenfeld J Darrin Gross I'd like to ask you. David Blumenfeld, what is the BIGGEST RISK? David Blumenfeld We're going to answer it a couple different ways, if that's okay. So I think I mean, and this, this first one might, might seem like a self serving answer, but I think the risk for real estate companies in general for not looking at technology. And again, it doesn't have to be the biggest, you know, the biggest, the newest, the the flashiest, but if you're not incorporating technology into your your your day to day operations, whether it be from a marketing perspective, a company, a leasing perspective, Building Management, etc, you are getting left behind and and the good news for you is that the real estate industry moves slow, but as it gets more and more competitive from insert certainly In certain asset classes, office being one of them to not be investing in kind of future proofing your building and your company is going to come back and bite you in the long term and so and both from a just an operational perspective, but also eventually, eventually from a recruiting perspective, where people who are going to you're going to want In your company are not going to want to work. Want to work at your company if you're not forward thinking. From a tech perspective, I think the biggest concern right now, excitement and concern certainly is with AI and things like conversational AI, like chat GPT, we have, we have clients who their legal departments come in and we can't use AI at all. And I think the concern, the practical concern there is, there is a risk of, if you're using kind of a, you know, chat GPT, or Microsoft co pilot, one of these, or Google Gemini, is it, depending on the information you're putting in to have, let's say you're like, I want to put, you know, I use it a lot for writing better copy, maybe of writing a better email than I wrote already, because I realized I'm just not saying that quite right. But you know, there's it's much more powerful than that. You can put in financial data, for example, that would spit back a spreadsheet for you, or different analysis that might you know normally take hours on in Excel. There is risk when you start to upload proprietary information from a financial perspective, but the but you need to kind of balance that risk with what you're what you're using those tools for, because they are very powerful and very efficient as well. So I think it's making sure you don't swing the pendulum one way or the other, like you need to certainly use AI in your business. But I think if you're going to start to do a lot of things through AI, you know, there are ways to protect the information that you're you're putting out there, and you don't have to just throw something in chat GPT. You can have an application that's specific to your company, that leverages AI, but may be able to spit out kind of your your own private version of chat GPT, so to speak. So you just need to be, you just need to understand the implications and the risks of of if you're using kind of a generic service, you know, be, you know, there is a risk that you're putting that data, not it's not necessarily means that those companies are going to use it against you, but you are uploading that information into into the cloud. And I think it's funny, you've seen a lot in America around like, Oh, we're going to ban Tiktok because we're worried about China, you know, stealing all this data. Well, China's come out with a lot of new AI platforms. Lately, nobody's talking about the data privacy implications. Like, I would be much more concerned about using, putting anything in a in a Chinese AI software platform versus, you know, my social media via Tiktok. So it's, it's just funny how people are not thinking about things holistically. And I think that's, that's just what you need to make sure you need to do. But again, as I said in my earlier very common beginning of, you know, the beginning of the conversation, don't get into analysis paralysis, where you justify doing nothing because you have to overthink it over and over again. /episode/index/show/commercialrealestatepronetwork/id/36813525

Real Estate Trends with Simon Isaacs - CRE PN #505 05/29/2025

BIGGEST RISK with Simon Isaacs 05/27/2025

Retail Strip Mall Investment Opportunities with Davie Codrea - CRE PN #504 05/22/2025

BIGGEST RISK with David Codrea 05/20/2025

BIGGEST RISK with David Codrea J Darrin Gross I'd like to ask you. David Codrea, what is the BIGGEST RISK? David Codrea For me, what I see as the biggest risk that impacts my business the most is time. So it looks at it, there's a huge benefit to time, but there's also a huge risk if you are not able to get the ball moving on things so extended vacancy or or even just time to make a decision if it takes too long for your organization to get things through, to make, get, get approval for something, or make a decision on what you're going to do with this tenant or that tenant. I think that that can lead to a lot of risk. Because one, you've got an organization that doesn't really know, like, hey, which? How are we making a decision? When? When are we going to make the decision? And no one knows you have, you know, opportunities that can be missed because of inability to move. And I think we've, if you look at business as a whole, a lot of times, really, really big companies. These look like the 10 biggest companies that are out there. It used to be that big companies would get slower, and now the more the shift is, some of these big organizations are just getting faster and faster and faster. If you look at Amazon, they're they've just been pushing to go faster. It used to be you get something delivered in a couple days, and then it became next day. And now it's like, Hey, can we do the same day? Like they're getting faster. I think they're realizing that time is time is the biggest risk that they have to for them to lose a customer in my business, you know, I'm not Amazon, but if we don't get back to people, we're going to lose them. You know that that mentality is shifting through to everyone. Everyone Everyone wants everything right now. So if you don't have a way to do things faster and avoid that loss of time, that's the biggest risk that's out there. And probably for any business. /episode/index/show/commercialrealestatepronetwork/id/36334765

Wealth Accumulation through Real Estate Investment with Joel Miller - CRE PN #503 05/15/2025

BIGGEST RISK with Joel Miller 05/13/2025

Disaster Preparedness Risk Management with Creek Stewart - CRE PN #502 05/08/2025

BIGGEST RISK with Creek Stewart 05/06/2025

Regulation D Syndications for Accredited Investors with Tilden Moschetti - CRE PN #501 05/01/2025

BIGGEST RISK with Tilden Moschetti 04/29/2025

Legal Disputes Alternative Dispute Resolution with Rich Lee - CRE PN #500 04/24/2025

BIGGEST RISK with Rich Lee 04/22/2025

BIGGEST RISK with Rich Lee J Darrin Gross I'd like to ask you Rich Lee, what is the BIGGEST RISK? Rich Lee I'll answer that kind of in like two parts really quickly, right? The first is, I think, you know, in the real estate industry, and actually in business in general, I think the biggest risk, you know, in a lot of just kind of business dealings is the relationship, right, and and maintaining good relationships, whether it's with an existing, you know, Counterparty, or, you know, a future counterparty or a former Counterparty. Relationships are everything you know. And so all the things you do right to mitigate that you know both before, and then, of course, you know during a relationship. And then, God forbid, you know if something sours in that relationship, I think that's, you know, it's critical. And something that I think is is often overlooked for us as a business, right? The thing that I will think about all the time, and that we obsess about is, you know, frankly, and it's, it's still related to the relationship, it's the user experience, you know, both on the platform, you know, on our actual technology platform, but also just the experience overall, and the experience for all the people that would be involved in in, you know, in a dispute on our on our platform, which is both, you know, the plaintiff, the defendant, the two sides who are actually in a disagreement, their lawyers, Right? So that's two more parties, and then the arbitrators and mediators themselves, you know, and their experience, you know, administering and adjudicating a case on our platform. And so it's something that we obsess over a lot in terms of, you know, both the people we hire, you know, finding the best people who are smart, bias towards action empathetic, right? So even your interactions with us are positive. And then, of course, everything, every product we design, every feature we add, every additional process we create, even every new rule or any rule change we make right to to our arbitration rules, always with that kind of end user in mind, and like what the experience is going to be. And, of course, fairness above all else. /episode/index/show/commercialrealestatepronetwork/id/36118115

Technical Report Management with Kelly Stratton - CRE PN #499 04/17/2025

BIGGEST RISK with Kelly Stratton 04/15/2025

BIGGEST RISK with Kelly Stratton J Darrin Gross I like, to ask my guests if they can look at their own situation. Could be your clients, the economy, you know, whatever it is that you, you identify and consider to be the BIGGEST RISK? Kelly Stratton Yeah. And when you ask, like, the first thing that pops in my head, because I, you know, as the chief product officer, and I kind of help drive like, what is our product going to be, you know, today, versus, you know, six months from now, a year from now, and you know, we have a really strong feedback loop with our users, and they have a mandate for us about, how can we make a difference in their work lives and in their work product? And both those things are really important to me, because this is a bit like our platform, is a space they spend a lot of time in. And, you know, so, so you have that, but then you also have this, this powerful energy around AI, and how do we incorporate that intelligently and effectively into our product? And again, the mandate from our customers is, you know, is pretty specific. They want to be able to access their past experience. They want to be able to interact with their and harvest their intellectual property, and it that that you know, you know, again, I use the phrase institutionalize that knowledge that's really important to them. You know, in the past, it's just, you know, write the report and put it in the file folder, and then it's on to the next one. But there's an awakening around this, like, hey, no, this isn't just an archive this that that we never look at again. How can we use this as a tool to make train our team and improve our reports and our process going forward? So I think just getting creating products where we give them access to their content, smart, yeah, powered searching, and we, we don't step outside of that too much, right? That we give them kind of the the access to their historical information, that that can really make a difference, and we deliver on it. So I think for me, is continuing to keep purpose built as our North Star, and we introduce risk if we spread ourselves too thin and are not incorporating kind of that feedback with our customer for things that they want, and then the things that we know how our product makes a big difference in how AI kind of supports both of those things. So. That's how I'd say that risk is getting AI right for our customers, helping lead them away being lead the way for them, being their innovation partner, and not spreading ourselves too thin. /episode/index/show/commercialrealestatepronetwork/id/36032710

Preserving Historically Significant Real Estate with Steve Austin - CRE PN #498 04/10/2025

BIGGEST RISK with Steve Austin 04/08/2025

BIGGEST RISK with Steve Austin J Darrin Gross I'd like to ask you, Steve Austin, what is the BIGGEST RISK? Steve Austin That's a good question, I think right now for specifically for us, there's a tremendous uncertainty around the future tax policy. There's a lot of talk about, you know, closing the IRS and putting in tariffs, and so there's a lot of speculation and and stuff swirling around right now. So I think that presents a significant risk to us, but, but just, you know, kind of getting away from, you know, the regulatory risk, you know, I think, for for anybody who's out there in business, in in particular, raising investor capital right now, the, I think the biggest risk is, is just, you know, are you able to build a repeatable, scalable process in your business, you know? So for us, that's, you know, how do we source deals? How do we underwrite deals? How do we close deals, you know, what? What are the right structures for the deals, you know, and kind of systematizing that is, is kind of my view of risk mitigation from from a business perspective, because, you know, at the end of the day, investors, you know, they have a lot of options with their money, and you know what, what you're asking them to do is to trust that you have the right process to consistently, you know, generate. Returns. And you know, my answer to that is often risk management. You know, to your point, you know you can, you can avoid a lot of risk just by being cautious in, you know, not using a lot of leverage and debt and things like that. So, you know, we while, while taxes are a component of what we do, you know, we're also trying to generate returns, you know, without a lot of risk. You know, a lot of lot of folks refer to that as risk adjusted returns, right? And you know, so when you're buying buildings debt free, it certainly gives you a much wider, you know, birth to operate in, in my opinion, /episode/index/show/commercialrealestatepronetwork/id/36031965